Seeking The Fallen

Decades After Wwii, A Missing Pilot's Mystery Is Finally Solved

December 15, 2002|By ESTHER SCHRADER Special to the Daily Press

She knew he had been lost in World War II. She had seen the photos, some letters, the Purple Heart. But her childhood fantasy that her dad would someday return was bundled away in adulthood as tightly as the ties binding that trunk.

Now her mother was dead, her stepfather had remarried, a new century was starting, and she was feeling melancholy, saddened that she knew so little about the man who had given her life. She had seen "Saving Private Ryan," and been moved by its tales of World War II dead, by the image of P-51s, the plane she knew her father had flown, sweeping in over Normandy. She learned there were others like her searching for answers.

"I said I'd like to get involved in that. There was an interest nationwide in World War II that had not happened before. I hadn't thought about my dad for years, but I just got stirred to do something," Cross said. "I wanted to know. I want my children to know their heritage. Mom's dead, and I'm angry at myself that I started asking these questions too late to help her. But I want to bring Dad home."

Sharon enlisted the help of a family friend, Ken Breaux, a former Vietnam-era naval officer who had his own ghosts to chase. Breaux had trained as an aviator, but when he saw the rate at which Navy pilots were dying in Vietnam, he managed to secure a position that afforded him the relative safety of a ship. He never completely conquered the guilt he felt that others were dying instead of him.

Breaux, a computer consultant, took up the search for Lewis as a personal crusade. His inquiry at first led nowhere. There was no burial place for William Lewis in any cemetery maintained by the American Battle Monuments Commission. No explanation of his disappearance existed in U.S. military records. There was no definitive civilian record of his death in the U.S. After 57 years, Lewis was still missing in action.

"When I began this search, I felt that it was possible that Sharon's mother had known of the circumstances, but that after her marriage and the passage of years, she had simply chosen not to tell Sharon of the details," Breaux said. "Now I felt that it was possible that Bill Lewis' loss was a mystery that even the Army Air Forces, with all their resources, had failed to solve."

Breaux's research took him into the expanding universe of people who are caught up in the story of World War II missing. Some had lost family or friends in the war. Some, like Breaux, were veterans who felt the guilt of survivors. Some were aviation buffs or adventurers who set off on their own for places like Papua New Guinea, looking for World War II aircraft crash sites. Others, like Sharon, had been children when they lost fathers in the war and were only now asking serious questions. The Internet brought all those different people together with new ease.

After just a week of surfing online bulletin boards and putting out queries about the missing Bill Lewis, Breaux signed on to his computer in January 2001 and was greeted by a most amazing e-mail.

It was from Jan Zdiarsky, writing from the town of Kovarska in the Czech Republic. Zdiarsky wrote that he had been researching a little-documented air battle for many years, assembling detailed accounts of all the pilots, German and American. According to his records, he wrote, of 140 airmen killed, captured or missing in action, only William M. Lewis and a B-17 pilot had not been found.

But perhaps Lewis had been found. Zdiarsky said he believed that he and a colleague had discovered the crash site of Lewis' plane a year earlier, in a forest more than 100 miles from Kovarska, in what had been East Germany.

He said he had been trying to find Lewis' family ever since.

In March 1982, workers rewiring a school building in Kovarska, a Czech town that had been occupied by Nazi Germany, came across a bundle in an air shaft. Wrapped in a pair of World War II-era flying overalls, inside a leather wallet, were documents bearing the name Staff Sgt. John C. Kluttz of Dallas, Texas.

The dusty bundle fell at the feet of local schoolboys watching the repair work.

The discovery excited young Jan's imagination. He had heard the stories old men told about a great air battle fought over Kovarska. But in Czechoslovakia, by then in the Soviet sphere, gathering facts about the battle was not easy. For years Jan and his friends secretly combed forests and fields, often finding airplane wreckage. What they pieced together was that indeed a great battle had been fought over Kovarska's skies. The ball-turret gunner John Kluttz's plane was just one of a half-dozen aircraft, American and German, that had crashed in and around the town.

(A photograph Zdiarsky found years later, taken in the days after the air battle, showed the tail end of Kluttz's plane sticking out of the roof of the school. Kluttz, who survived the crash and lived until 1987, had apparently hidden his belongings in the damaged air shaft. The school was renamed Sgt. J.C. Kluttz Primary School in 1994.)